COURSE PLANNING AND SYLLABUS DESIGN

COURSE PLANNING AND SYLLABUS DESIGN

Submitted to fulfill one of the requirements of Curriculum and Material Development

Lecturer: Yayan Suryana, Drs. M.Pd.

Written by :

Ditha Febrivania (III B)

NPM. 108060053

ENGLISH EDUCATIONAL DEPARTMENT

TEACHING AND EDUCATIONAL SCIENCES FACULTY

SWADAYA GUNUNG JATI UNIVERSITY

2011

Course Planning and Syllabus Design

The course rationale

A starting point in course development is a description of the course rationale. Developing a rationale also helps provide focus and direction to some of the deliberations involved in course planning.

Describing the entry and exit level

In order to plan a language course, it necessary to know the level at which the program will start and the level learners may be expected to reach at the end of the course. Language programs and commercial materials typically distinguish between elementary, intermediate, and advance levels, but these categories are too broad for the kind of detailed planning that program and materials development involves.

Choosing course content

Decisions about course content reflect the planners, assumptions about the nature of language, language use, and language learning, what the most essential elements or units of language are, and how these can be organized as an efficient basis for second language.

Determining the scope and sequence

The sequencing of content in the course also needs to be determined. Sequencing may be based on the following criteria.

Simple to complex

Chronology

Need

Prerequisite learning

Whole to part or part to whole

Spiral sequencing

Planning the course structure

Two aspects of this process, however, require more detailed planning: selecting a syllabus framework and developing instructional blocks.

Selecting a syllabus framework

A syllabus describes the major elements that will be used in planning a language course and provides the basis for its instructional focus and content.

§ Grammatical (structural) syllabus: one hat is organized around grammatical items.

§ Lexical syllabus: one that identifies a target vocabulary to be taught normally arranged according to levels.

§ Functional syllabus: one that is organized around communicative functions. A functional syllabus seeks to analyze the concept of communicative competence into its different components on the assumptions that mastery of individual functions will result in overall communicative ability.

§ Situational syllabus: one that is organized around the language needed for different situations. A situational syllabus identifies the situations in which the learner will use the language and typical communicative acts and language used in that setting.

§ Topical or content-based syllabus: one that is organized around themes, topics, or other units of content. With topical syllabus, content rather than grammar, functions, or situations is the starting point in syllabus design.

§ Competency-based syllabus: one based on a specification of the competencies learners are expected to master in relation to specific situations and activities.

§ Skills syllabus: one that is organized around the different underlying abilities that are involved in using a language for purposes.

§ Task-based syllabus: one that is organized around tasks that students will complete in the target language. A task is an activity or goal that that is carried out using language.

§ Text-based syllabus: one that is built around texts and samples of extended discourse.

§ An integrated syllabus: decisions about a suitable syllabus framework for a course reflect different priorities in teaching rather than absolute choices.

Developing instructional blocks

Two commonly used instructional blocks are planning by modules and units.

v Modules: this is self-contained and independent learning sequence with its own objectives. Modules allow for flexible organization of a course and can give learners a sense of achievement because objectives are more immediate and specific.

v Units: a unit seeks to provide a structured sequence of activities that lead toward a learning outcome. The factors that account for a successful unit include:

ü Length: sufficient but not too much material is included.

ü Development: one activity leads effectively into the next: the unit does not consist of a random sequence of activities.

ü Pacing: each activity within the unit moves at a reasonable place.

ü Outcome: at the end of the unit, students should be able to know or do a series of things that are related.

Preparing the scope and sequence plan

Once a course has been planned and organized, it can be described. One form in which it can be described is as a scope and sequence plan. This might consists of a listing of the module or units and their contents and an indication of how much teaching time each block in the course will require.

PLANNING GOALS AND LEARNING OUTCOMES

PLANNING GOALS AND LEARNING OUTCOMES

Submitted to fulfill one of the requirements of Curriculum and Material Development

Lecturer: Yayan Suryana, Drs. M.Pd.

Written by :

Ditha Febrivania (III B)

NPM. 108060053

ENGLISH EDUCATIONAL DEPARTMENT

TEACHING AND EDUCATIONAL SCIENCES FACULTY

SWADAYA GUNUNG JATI UNIVERSITY

2011

Several key assumptions about goals characterize the curriculum approach to educatioanal planning. These can be summarized as follows:

· People are generally motivated to pursue specifics goals.

· The use of goals in teaching improves the effectiveness of teaching and learning.

· A program will be effective to the extent that its goals are sound and clearly described.

The Ideology of the curriculum

In developing goals for educational programs, curriculum planners draw on their understanding both of the present and long-term needs of learners and of society as well as the planners’ beliefs and ideologies about schools, learners, and teachers. These beliefs and values provide the philosophical underpinnings for educational programs and the justification for the kinds of aims they contain. At any given time, however, a number of competing or complementary perspectives are available concerning the focus of the curriculum.

Academic rationalism

Academic rationalism is sometimes used to justify the inclusion of certain foreign languages in school curricula, where they are taught not as tools for communication but as an aspect of social studies.

This ideology is also sometimes used as justification for including courses on literature, or American or British culture, in a language program.

Clark (1987, 6) points out that in the United Kingdom academic rationalism is concerned with:

· The maintenance and transmission through education of the wisdom and culture of previous generations. This has led to the creation of a two-tier system of education-one to accord with the “higher” cultural traditions of an elite, and the other to cater for the more concrete and practical lifestyles of the messes.

· The development for the elite of generalizable intellectual capacities and critical faculties.

· The maintenance of stands through an inspectorate and external examination boards controlled by the universities.

Social and Economic efficiency

Socioeconomic ideology stresses the economic needs of society as a justification for the teaching of English. Successful economies in the twenty-first century are increasingly knowledge-based, and the bulk of the world’s knowledge is in the English language. In a recent debate over standards of English in Japan, poor standards of English were cited as one reason for Japan’s economic malaise in the late 1990s.

Learner-centeredness

Constructivists emphasize that learning involves active construction and testing of one’s own representation of the world and accommodation of it to one conceptual framework.

Social reconstructionism

This curriculum emphasizes the roles of schools and learners can and should play addressing social injustices and inequality. Curriculum development is not seen as a neutral process.

The most persuasive and currently popular representatives of this view-point are associated with the movement known as critical theory and critical pedagogy.

Cultural pluralism

Cultural pluralism seeks to redress racism, to raise the self-esteem of minority groups, and to help children appreciate the viewpoints of other cultures and religions.

Stating curriculum outcomes

Aims

The purposes of aim statements are:

· To provide a clear definition of the purposes of a program

· To provide guidelines for teachers, learners, and materials writers

· To help provide a focus for instruction

· To describe important and realizable change in learning

Objectives

Aims are very general statements of the goals of a program. They can be interpreted in many different ways.

Objectives generally have the following characteristics:

· They describe what the aim seeks to achieve in terms of smaller units of learning.

· They provide a basis for the organization of teaching activities.

· They describe earning in terms of observable behavior or performance.

The advantages of describing the aims of a course in terms of objectives are:

· They facilities planning, once objectives have been agreed on, course planning, materials preparation, textbook selection, and related processes can begin.

· They provide measurable outcomes and thus provide accountability; given a set of objectives, the success or failure of program to teach the objectives can be measured.

· They are perspective; they describe how planning should proceed and do away with subjective interpretations and personal opinions.

Criticisms of the use of the objectives

The major criticisms of their use are:

Objectives turn teaching into a technology

Objectives trivialize teaching and are product-oriented

Objectives are unsuited to many aspects of language uses

The English Language Syllabus for the Teaching of English at Primary Level (1991) in Singapore includes a number of categories of process objectives. These are described as follows:

1. Thinking skills

2. Learning how to learn

3. Language and culture